Hi Hannah,
Welcome to your personalized Grit Lab Report!
We will go week by week, reviewing everything you have told us through Poll Everywhere.
We hope this will help you reflect on what you have learned and experienced during Grit Lab.
Important note!
Sometimes, you may not have been able to respond to all polls.
If the data for one of the polls is missing, the automatic report will display NA, or ““.
Okay, let’s get started!
The first half of Grit Lab delves deep intp the passion facet of Grit.
We like to call it Choose Easy, because we think gritty people pursue what they enjoy.
Putting it graphically, gritty people tend to pursue the intersection of these four circles.
The first time we met, you told us where you were on the grit rubric.
Regarding passion you picked Stage 4: I have an interest I’m actively pursuing, voluntarily devoting more than 3 hours of “free time” each week .
Regarding perseverance you picked .
As you know, grit grows, so don’t worry if you are not yet where you’d like to be in your grit journey.
Hopefully, this class will help you become grittier each day.
In week 2, we looked at your interests.
Interest is an emotion, and it is the opposite of boredom.
Your interests are the activities or subjects that spontaneously grab your attention.
Trying things out and seeing how you feel is the best way to refine your interests.
In week 3, we studied values, your beliefs about what is important.
You said your top three values were achievement, universalism, and benevolence.
You wrote a “This I Believe” essay, and here’s where you located it on Schwartz’s value taxonomy.
When we talked about strengths in week 4, you said your personality strength was agreeableness.
You said your top three talents were verbal, analytic, and social.
We then talked about goal hierarchies.
You said you had a pretty good idea about your top-level goal.
We discussed self-concordance, or how much a goal aligns to your deeply held values and beliefs.
A goal you said you will be pursuing for the next six months is to be a really good ta .
Here is how self-concordant that goal was:
Don’t worry if your self-concordance for that particular goal is low.
It might mean that you need to reframe that goal in a way that makes it more relevant to your deep self, or change it!
Remember that self-concordance is goal specific, so other goals might be more self-concordant.
We then transitioned to the second part of Grit Lab:
Work Smart
In week 6, we looked at goal setting and planning.
You WOOPed!
For your Wish, what you wanted to accomplish, you said Get my flu shot .
For your Outcome, what would happen if your wish came true, you said I’m practicing health goals .
For you Obstacle, what it is within you that stands in your way, you said I forget/ don’t find the time .
For your Plan, you created this when-then plan to achieve your goal: When I finish hanging out with my friend I will go to the flu clinic .
Whether you changed your WOOP or stuck to that one, here’s where it landed between being a total fail, and going exactly according to plan.
And here’s how much you learned
These goals are hard, and despite our best efforts, our plans can fail.
The important thing is that you learn something along the way!
In week 7, we talked about deliberate practice.
You shared you’ve done daily practice in SATs .
We learned that deliberate practice requires a challenging, hyperspecific goal, maximum concentration, instant feedback, and is often done alone.
In week 8, we discussed feedback.
Even though feedback can be hard to take, it is often the key to improve. So if you want to improve, seek it actively!
You said you felt Cutious when receiving critical feedback, and Cutious when receiving positive feedback.
We then turned to learning about stress.
In week 9, you reported feeling a moderate amount of stress in your life right now, the primary source of it being classes .
We also talked about adversity and failure.
Although related, adversity and failure are different:
Adversity happens to us, whereas failure is something for which we are generally more responsible.
However, how we interpret stress and failure matters…
Interestingly, research has found that people who believe that stress can facilitate learning and growth experience enhanced performance, well-being, and health.
And failure—not achieving a particular goal—can be interpreted as “I’m learning!” and lead you to look for the lesson in that experience.
We closed the Work Smart section of the class by talking about habits.
Throughout the semester, you practice habit building using your Build-A-Habit Guide book.
You describe the habit you chose as Something else .
Whether you were successful in habit building or not, this is how much you learned.
Finally, what good is grit if we do not dream for others?
So, we transitioned to Paying it Forward.
In week 10, we looked at mentors: role models that take an active role in your growth.
Hopefully, your mentor was authoritative, being both supportive and demanding.
Here’s how you described them:
You also wrote a gratitude letter to Other .
In one word, you said it made you feel Embarrassed .
One way of paying it forward is having a prosocial, beyond-the-self purpose. Here’s how you responded to items assessing that.
… and so quickly we arrived at the end of the semester.
Here’s how your mood varied over these weeks.
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Do you notice any patterns? Is there anything that correlates with your mood?
Here you can scroll through all the quotes you wrote to summarize each class.
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| I know this ironically is not the main conclusion of this part of class but I thought the idea that it is more helpful to think of success as a destination while pursuing it was really interesting. |
| The biggest idea from todays class in my opinion is the importance of falling in love with an interest before really getting to intentionally getting better at it. |
| You are better at learning if you already know a decent amount |
| I thought it was so interesting that professor Duckworth said that GRIT is not morally superior. |
| You have to imagine outcomes, identify obstacles, and make if-then plans after thinking of a goal |
| Quality over (or as much as) quantity |
| How different emotions are often a result of the effect on your self esteem |
| You should prioritize changing your environment to make or break habits |
| Being authoritative is the best way to mentor |
In the final class, we looked back to everything we’ve learned together and to how our passion and perseverance evolved during this class.
Here are the comments from your Grit Lab Teammates:
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| Beverly Feng |
| Each time Hannah was assigned the group leader role, she facilitated incredibly thoughtful conversations. She always made sure to ask questions about how we were doing to break the ice and guided the flow of our discussions well. Hannah is a very easygoing person and I thoroughly enjoyed having her in our group. I really admire her drive and commitment to her extracurricular activities, specifically Bloomers, and loved hearing about her experiences in that role! |
| Valeria Celi Damis |
| Hannah, thank you so much for showing up to every class with such a positive attitude and willingness to learn. I really admire how even though you are only a sophomore and our group was entirely seniors you didn’t let this shy you away from discouraging. Your thoughtful approach to every bit of class content pushed me out of my comfort zone and encouraged me to consider things from a different perspective. Beyond that, I think you are genuinely one of the funniest people I have ever had the pleasure of sitting next to in class. Your personality is oriented towards others in a sense that you always look for some way to make other peoples day brighter. Your sense of humor is contagious, and it truly adds a positive vibe to our class and just in general you bring so much joy. Thank you, Hannah, for being such a positive force.
I really admired your discovery project because the sense of genuine curiosity you brought along with it was evident in everything you presented. I admire how you chose something that was very niche and still managed to explore it in a very individualistic way. Your perspective on youth and children’s literature gave me a new mindset because it made me realize that 1- problems seem more manageable if they are broken down to their simplest components, but 2- nothing is truly that deep. It was fun to hear you explore the genre and also find genuine joy in learning about Aesop and little known details that we often overlook. I’m so excited to see how this intermingles with your other passions outside of class and see how these learnings shape your Penn experience.
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We hope you have emerged from Grit Lab a little grittier than you started.
Do you want to see how your grit rubric changed?
Drumroll please…
Don’t worry if the rubric doesn’t yet reflect growth. It is only a coarse measure that cannot replace your own self-reflection.
In any case, grit is not built in a day…
…remember that progress is never smooth…
…so stay passionate and persevering in the lifelong quest of choosing easy, working smart, and paying it forward.
With grit and gratitude,
Angela and the Grit Lab team.